Illusion Redux

But if your body sense is so labile, so willing to imitate and share in the identity of others, so easily seduced by tools and cyberspatial illusions, why doesn’t the “you-ness” part of you ever simply get lost? What accounts for that kernel of selfhood that you feel at the center of your being, to which you always have reference and always return? Is there a locus of your core consciousness, a foundation for experiencing yourself as an independent being? What keeps your mind embodies in your particular body?

A new discipline that has been dubbed “the neuroscience of the self” is beginning to find answers to questions like these. In laboratories around the world, researchers are gaining glimpses of how each of us builds up the sense – or perhaps it’s an illusion – that are separate individuals with self-agency, self awareness, and free will.

Another answer has to do with the barrage of sensory feedback that your brain received from your body each day. Every time you see or move your hands, forearms, trun, legs and feet, and other body parts, your brain maps know what is happening, thanks to your somatic senses – especially touch, balance, proprioception, and interoception. ~ Page 204

So, is the self ultimately “just” an illusion? Are we, in the words of the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, “just a pack of neurons,” or, to rephrase him, “just a pack of illusions?” according to the neuroscience of body maps – and, incidentally, the majority of Eastern religions – in many respects, yes. ~ Page 207

But how to square that notion with common sense? Can the self really be an illusion? After all, you can pinch yourself, you can reach out and move objects, you can change people's minds, you can choose among entrees on the menu. you are a flesh-and-blood person with all your faculties. you are demonstrably an independent being unto yourself. And crucially, you clearly have the precious faculty of free will. the you-ness of you really, really doesn't feel like an illusion. But of course, that is how illusions are: They appear convincingly to be certain way, but the underlying reality may be very different.

The illusion of the self isn't that there is no such thing as you. nor does the illusion of free will mean that you cannot make choices. Instead, the illusion is that the self and free will are not really what they seem to be from your, the "end user's" perspective. The illusion of free will is that free will has infinite scope, rather than being flexible set of feedback loops between higher-order body maps and emotional and memory-storage systems in the brain. The illusions of the self is that self is a kernel, rather than a distributed, emergent system. ~ Page 208

....... There is no central address in the brain, no point where all the information "comes together' to produce the feeling of undivided sentience you enjoy and take for granted. It's all distributed, among lots of sensory maps and motor maps and other brain areas. Localizations of psychic functions are better said to exist in loops of information processing, or circuits, rather than specific points. Some of these maps and circuits are just more important to you than others.

In much the way people used to wonder where the sun sent while it was underground at night, many people continue to wonder where the core psychic self really is. But it apparently arises "merely" from the sum of brain activity distributed across dozens of maps and other brain regions. It is an orchestra without a conductor or a fixed score and no conductor, the mind has no kernel, no "little man" sitting at the center of the fray directing the action. But it is teeming with non-central "little men," the brain's motley team of homunculi, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus who from the backbone of the whole production. And you, thankfully, have the irreducible illusion of being the conductor of your life's music in all its complexity, emotional nuance, crescendo and diminuendo - to ballad that is the you-ness of you. ~ Page 208 (The Body has a Mind of its own)